I never played WoW but its a lot faster paced than EQ in my opinion. They use AP (Action Points) instead of mana which everyone has for special skills (melee included).
It also seems that you quickly regenerate HP as well quickly between battles so there isn't any down time which I found very nice. Of course the same applies to mobs so if you wail on a mob and then run away long enough to get you HP back up the mob will have his HP back full as well.
Yes, I find myself pounding the keyboard in certain orders based on certain combos of spells. I've been playing a magus which generally I start out by summoning a demon first and sicing him on the target with me hitting him with a no time cast but 10 second cool down spell and then follow up with another ranged 3 second cast by no cooldown spell and then again and then the burst spell.
Its not like playing a console fighting game with combos but its not simply click on the enemy and press auto attack either.
Somewhere in between... I personally don't find it overwhelming but its not that slow either.
What the other person said about the auction houses and lack of crafting, but the best gear IMO is garnered through public quests and RvR scenarios rather than buying it. Most of the stuff is "bind to player" so you can't transfer it anyways.
And since they just lifted the NDA I can openly talk about this.
Yes, the game has some rough edges, but damn its got a lot of content.
Way too much content so I ended up skipping a lot of it just to explore areas.
Anyways, coming from the background of a GW fan, I will say that Mythic has captured the atmosphere quite well. There is always something to do and I never found myself saying to myself "Hey... I'm just grinding."
Yeah some of it was, but it wasn't a boring grinding.
There isn't an economy to speak of, but I believe maybe that was the best design decision ever to make a game without an economy rather than a broken economy that inspires gold farmers and imbalances the game.
I agree on the money but not the gold. Due to it's unique properties (malleability, ductility, conductivity, etc) gold has utility value, in other words you can use it for things (it's also shiny and pretty). Additionally, it's relatively rare, which increases it's value.
Well this might be off topic, but I agree with Warren Buffet personal views. For industrial and manufacturing uses, silver is a better commodity.
Secondly, gold itself doesn't do anything useful. It doesn't earn you interest and it doesn't exactly beat inflation like the stock market. If you look at inflation, gold was worth way more in 1980 than it was now. (a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Gold_price.png">source)
And if there was a societal collapse like some gold bugs claim, I would think guns, water, and canned food would be more valuable than gold.
Well... If you had guns you could simply just take the gold from the people who didn't have guns after all.
Again, this all about perception and keeping up illusions. If you can make someone believe what you own is valuable, you can make them put forth effort in order to get what you have into their possession.
If you make someone have a false memory of wanting or liking something you can really make them do as you please.
Well, the religion of Buddhism is based around the idea that reality is simply a delusion on the grandest scale and once you come to understand that you'll be at peace.
On the same subject, our economy is really based on illusion/delusions at the core of it. Money itself is inteself of non-intrisnic value. Well, to be fair... Even gold isn't really useful at the basic levels by itself. (Warren Buffet once joked why do value something that just gets dug up from a hole only to be buried in another somewhere in a bank.)
It is simply only valuable because everyone agrees it to be so. If no one agreed that your money or gold was valuable then you just have unusable matter sitting there.
In the same aspect, all our social interactions and business dealings are based around perception. TV commercials are the best example of why this works the way it does. If you can make people believe in something, to them it is true.
If you have control of this perception then you can make people do as you please... Which I think 1984 was trying to point out to us. Its not about just rewriting history but the perception of people on reality.
A nuclear plant could produce twice that on about ten acres.
True, but you can't install your own nuclear power plant in your basement (well without getting into trouble) and get off the grid all together.
I'm all for large development of solar panel because eventually that means the panels that you can install yourself will be developed sooner than later and therefore sooner you can get off the grid all together and never have to pay a power company a dime ever again.
What's wrong with you? How would you "love" your phone if you can't use it for its primary purpose? Is it mandatory to "love" this phone? Would you burn in hell if you don't? Or most of the people just lack balls to say that you don't "love" it anymore?
I think what he is trying to say "When it works, its works better than anything else out there in terms of functionality or meeting my personal preference."
Its like old Ultima Online. I loved to play that game to death but the game client was so damn buggy it crashed all the damn time.
It was a very love hate relationship. Sure I could play text muds, but it wasn't the same.
If your choice is governed by the mechanisms of a deterministic universe, there is really no possibility that you could pick either one; your choice is predetermined, and an observer with enough information could calculate with certainty what your choice will be before you make it.
I think the issue is pre-existing conditions.
Lets say you were giving out $100 dollar bills on the street corner by asking anyone that came near "Do you you want a hundred dollar bill? Yes or no?"
I would suspect the major of persons because of instinct and societal understanding of money would say yes 99.99% of the time.
However, there would be a small minority that would say no for any given reason, but those are often pre-existing to the situation. Either they have moral reasons for turning down the money or they have some psychological need to be random.
Which still isn't free will in a sense.
I suppose the major problem is that when the argument of free will comes up it gets regulated back into philosophy because its not measurable in any scientific sense even though the answer is looking us in the face.
I bet it also puts a hurting on your ability to tell the truth. Or tell anything.
Most westerners are under the misconception that truth equals immutable facts, but in truth its really what the person believes in. That is why torture doesn't work because the person maybe believe in something that has no factual basis and is willing to change their opinion on that.
You can create drugs to make people more talkative and trusting, but doesn't mean what they are saying is a fact. Simply that they believe it to be true.
If I thought I was being paid too little then I'd talk to my manager and/or find another job. If I thought I was working too long I'd talk to my manager and/or find another job.
No, its the law and if you don't like it then you can talk with your government representative or find another country to live in.;)
What bothers me about this is that you take away risk to persons from war, and those persons are more willing to wage war...which leads to more war.
I disagree.
Humanity has never really thought about the consequences of war that much before they actually were fighting it.
And even then, it tends to lead to situations like were having in Georgia right now where people are arguing who shot first or who killed the most people and then everyone gets in a fight again.
In reality, unmanned fighting craft will be the wave of the future simply because its more economical to fight a war that way and it can deliver more death to the enemy without risking casualties on your own part. (That was the whole point of switching from fights, to spears, to swords, to guns, to artillery, to tanks, and then to bombers)
This leads to my second point, I always thought fondling of the Bolo books in which the question was brought up why humans even bothered to fight inside fully intelligent machines which could fight on their own just as well or even better.
Two reason were explained...
The first was to show to the machines that the humans were willing to die along side of machines. Something of a honor and respect thing so that the machines wouldn't turn on the humans.
The second was because it gave the machines hatred or a reason to kill. In one of the novels the machine actually tells the human "No. I will no longer kill for you." and talks the human pilot into negotiating with the aliens.
In that regard, machines can be used to create calculated war crimes, but they won't go crazy do to combat fatigue or predisposed hatred like you saw in the Balkan wars or the issues were seeing in Russia (Russians and Georgians are very fond of each other).
Machines would never take revenge own their own. They would never just bomb a village because they are too scared to go in themselves.
Yeah I know these machines aren't fully AI, but the same thing applies to a guy sitting in an air conditioned bunker pushing the buttons. He's not getting shot at and he's not usually going to start blowing up people without being ordered to.
That still leaves calculated war crimes by the upper brass, but those things have always happened without unmanned machines as it is.
They still have the power to refuse classification if it's featuring illegal or seriously freaky shit.
Two points:
1. By default they determine what is illegal and what is not.
2. One mans freaky shit is another mans Mona Lisa.
To expound on number 2, is the question of who determines what is what?
Obviously, if you time traveled back to the 1950's and showed a copy of modern television to the average Joe off the street he'd most label it pornography.
And to continue on this issue, what is freaky shit itself illegal and not the actual acts?
If a person goes out and murders someone while recording it and passes around a video tape on the net, the persons owning the video tape shouldn't be prosecuted but rather the guy who murdered in the first place.
You could argue the attention made them do it, but I'm sure anyone willing to murder in the first place would still do it even if he didn't have an audience.
Even if it were possible for us to just "leave them alone", it wouldn't be a solution. They'd only continue to stagnate.
Do tell how western Europe rose out of the dark ages and became the modern world that it did now?
Actually, it had something to do with constant war, plague, and famine for almost 500 years.
That and the ejection of a good deal of its populace to colonies from the 1500's to the early 1900's.
The core problem is population.
The simplest solution would be birth control. Hell, China understands this with their one child policy. Not many people like it but without birth control the alternatives are only war, disease, and famine.
Let us not be pussies about this, short of submitting a biometric signature every time I want to authenticate just how else can a machine tell I am me?
You could implant an RDIF chip to someone heart which only functions when the heart is beating so if someone removed that it not longer function.
A little extreme, but no one could ever call you a pussy.
This is going to get modded flame bait but this is probably one of the reasons why your games in particular are getting pirated and not so much bought: people are downloading the pirated version, trying it a couple times, but because the game play is boring and repetitive, they are deleting it.
I think he's just asking the wrong question. Instead of asking why pirates are pirating, he should be asking why aren't buyers buying?
If he focuses on reaching out to his playerbase and building a community then loyalty will pay for itself.
Chechnya was de facto sovereign by your standards, having signed a peace treaty with Yeltsin after the first Chechen War.
The Russians honored the peace agreement until Chechen's invaded Dagestan.
Yes, the response was over the top, but if the radicals kept well enough alone then then Russia might have not went back in.
I'll concede the whole Caucasus region has been politically messed up for the past 100 years so one could basically create arguments blaming the Geopolitiks of WWI (Germany, Ottaman Empire, Russian Civil War, Stalin/Lenin) causing the situation we have today down there.
No one will ever win the argument of who shot first. You'll have to work on who is going to shoot last.
I think a more sensible legislation would be legalizing poking obnoxious cellphone loudmouths in the eye with pencils..
Personally, I have found that its more annoying when other passengers try to strike up a conversation with me.
Once I was flying during the summer by myself for business and I ended up sitting next to this really intoxicated lady in her late 50's. On retrospect it was kind of funny, but kept asking me personal questions and even offered me several thousand dollars if guessed her age right as well flaunting his rings and so on.
Being the gentleman that I was I politely declined and the paranoid in me felt that she was probaly trying to get me into a hotel room by herself and she wasn't exactly a looker. I tried to smile and answer with as short as possible the ever probing questions but she almost got into an altercation with the flight attendant over more drinks.
Luckily she passed out about 60 minutes or so into the flight and I fled my seat as soon as we landed.
If she had a cell phone, I'm sure it would have kept her occupied rather than having her attention directed towards me.
To be fair, its rare to be sitting next to an ever inquisitive passenger and most of the time the person sitting next to me is uninterested in me as I am of them.
It is VERY unlikely that electricity production costs in the US will increase that rapidy in the next few years since coal and nat gas are the primary fuels. Reserves for both are quite large.
If peak oil does happen, companies like Sasol will be hitting it big with Fischer-Tropsch coal to synthetic oil conversion which may actually increase the demand for coal.
As it stands, the recent trend in higher oil prices have also caused increases on coal as well as the decrease in coal price as oil declines in the past few weeks.
It might just be market speculation but oil and coal prices are tied together.
It's probably unanswerable, but I wonder how much energy it takes to make these cells, and how long it takes for them to offset that?
From my understanding, current systems (with tax rebate) pay for itself in 10 years at current prices from the end users standpoint.
However, if say conventional energy prices double again in the next 5 years, then solar panels will have payed for themselves in a much less of a time frame even without the rebate.
I think its a misnomer about how much any energy it takes to make something because the price of energy itself fluctuates with time. Lets say it might take 10 barrels of oil to create one solar panel that produces 1 barrel of energy a year saving which will pay itself off in 10 years but if oil costs $100 last year and $200 in the next 5, then your $1,000 system now is worth $2,000 and your system is creating the equivalent of $200 worth of energy saved a year therefore paying itself off in 5 years.
Hope that made sense. I'm sure the numbers are no where like that though.
Seeing that the price of sunlight is less volatile than the price oil or coal, one could really gamble that peak oil will make any investments into solar pay for itself in short order in the next decade.
What of a static non-expanding universe and alternate redshift paradigms?
A personal theory of mine is that redshift is affected by gravity and lack thereof.
Gravity's effect is more apparent the close you are to a body. The closer you are to the earth the more you are affected by earth's gravity and the closer you are to the moon the more you are moon's gravity and so on.
Hence, seeing light is affected by gravity, there might be something going off with the hand off between galaxies and other galaxies around it.
Now if only I can figure out how to get in on the luxury app market...
I can't find the source, but I remember hearing a story about NYC fashion design student whose senior thesis involved her buying expensive name brand clothing and then clothing from Target or Walmart and then swapping the tags that are sewn into the necklines.
She went to a consignment shop and asked more (of course) for the cheap clothes with luxury tags on the cheap clothing and less for the luxury items with the cheap tags on it.
As it turned out the clothes original from Wal Mart/Target sold quickly while the luxury items (even though priced cheaper) did not sell because of the tags.
Health records may be private - you don't particularly want your neighbors to know about it. But the company that is insuring you certainly has a right to know what type of risk they're insuring - and just like auto insurance your cost should reflect it.
Umm... The difference between not having car insurance and not having health insurance, is one you can't drive when you don't have it and the other you can die.
Sure you can always visit the emergency room, but for some treatments it requires a bit more long term treatment.
My beef is that you should not be able to deny anyone anywhere needed medical treatment for something they have no control over including and not limited to family history and genetics.
The issue is that we'd be paying a lot less less anyways towards health care if insurance would be focused more on preventative measures than waiting til people have no choice but go into the emergency room.
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I never played WoW but its a lot faster paced than EQ in my opinion. They use AP (Action Points) instead of mana which everyone has for special skills (melee included).
It also seems that you quickly regenerate HP as well quickly between battles so there isn't any down time which I found very nice. Of course the same applies to mobs so if you wail on a mob and then run away long enough to get you HP back up the mob will have his HP back full as well.
Yes, I find myself pounding the keyboard in certain orders based on certain combos of spells. I've been playing a magus which generally I start out by summoning a demon first and sicing him on the target with me hitting him with a no time cast but 10 second cool down spell and then follow up with another ranged 3 second cast by no cooldown spell and then again and then the burst spell.
Its not like playing a console fighting game with combos but its not simply click on the enemy and press auto attack either.
Somewhere in between... I personally don't find it overwhelming but its not that slow either.
What the other person said about the auction houses and lack of crafting, but the best gear IMO is garnered through public quests and RvR scenarios rather than buying it. Most of the stuff is "bind to player" so you can't transfer it anyways.
And since they just lifted the NDA I can openly talk about this.
Yes, the game has some rough edges, but damn its got a lot of content.
Way too much content so I ended up skipping a lot of it just to explore areas.
Anyways, coming from the background of a GW fan, I will say that Mythic has captured the atmosphere quite well. There is always something to do and I never found myself saying to myself "Hey... I'm just grinding."
Yeah some of it was, but it wasn't a boring grinding.
There isn't an economy to speak of, but I believe maybe that was the best design decision ever to make a game without an economy rather than a broken economy that inspires gold farmers and imbalances the game.
So gluing an weird uncanny mask on an actors face will be the future of animation?
Considering the quality of acting these days by Hollywood, anything that obstructs their faces would be an improvement.
I agree on the money but not the gold. Due to it's unique properties (malleability, ductility, conductivity, etc) gold has utility value, in other words you can use it for things (it's also shiny and pretty). Additionally, it's relatively rare, which increases it's value.
Well this might be off topic, but I agree with Warren Buffet personal views. For industrial and manufacturing uses, silver is a better commodity.
Secondly, gold itself doesn't do anything useful. It doesn't earn you interest and it doesn't exactly beat inflation like the stock market. If you look at inflation, gold was worth way more in 1980 than it was now. (a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Gold_price.png">source)
And if there was a societal collapse like some gold bugs claim, I would think guns, water, and canned food would be more valuable than gold.
Well... If you had guns you could simply just take the gold from the people who didn't have guns after all.
Again, this all about perception and keeping up illusions. If you can make someone believe what you own is valuable, you can make them put forth effort in order to get what you have into their possession.
If you make someone have a false memory of wanting or liking something you can really make them do as you please.
Well, the religion of Buddhism is based around the idea that reality is simply a delusion on the grandest scale and once you come to understand that you'll be at peace.
On the same subject, our economy is really based on illusion/delusions at the core of it. Money itself is inteself of non-intrisnic value. Well, to be fair... Even gold isn't really useful at the basic levels by itself. (Warren Buffet once joked why do value something that just gets dug up from a hole only to be buried in another somewhere in a bank.)
It is simply only valuable because everyone agrees it to be so. If no one agreed that your money or gold was valuable then you just have unusable matter sitting there.
In the same aspect, all our social interactions and business dealings are based around perception. TV commercials are the best example of why this works the way it does. If you can make people believe in something, to them it is true.
If you have control of this perception then you can make people do as you please... Which I think 1984 was trying to point out to us. Its not about just rewriting history but the perception of people on reality.
A nuclear plant could produce twice that on about ten acres.
True, but you can't install your own nuclear power plant in your basement (well without getting into trouble) and get off the grid all together.
I'm all for large development of solar panel because eventually that means the panels that you can install yourself will be developed sooner than later and therefore sooner you can get off the grid all together and never have to pay a power company a dime ever again.
What's wrong with you? How would you "love" your phone if you can't use it for its primary purpose? Is it mandatory to "love" this phone? Would you burn in hell if you don't? Or most of the people just lack balls to say that you don't "love" it anymore?
I think what he is trying to say "When it works, its works better than anything else out there in terms of functionality or meeting my personal preference."
Its like old Ultima Online. I loved to play that game to death but the game client was so damn buggy it crashed all the damn time.
It was a very love hate relationship. Sure I could play text muds, but it wasn't the same.
Hope that makes.
If your choice is governed by the mechanisms of a deterministic universe, there is really no possibility that you could pick either one; your choice is predetermined, and an observer with enough information could calculate with certainty what your choice will be before you make it.
I think the issue is pre-existing conditions.
Lets say you were giving out $100 dollar bills on the street corner by asking anyone that came near "Do you you want a hundred dollar bill? Yes or no?"
I would suspect the major of persons because of instinct and societal understanding of money would say yes 99.99% of the time.
However, there would be a small minority that would say no for any given reason, but those are often pre-existing to the situation. Either they have moral reasons for turning down the money or they have some psychological need to be random.
Which still isn't free will in a sense.
I suppose the major problem is that when the argument of free will comes up it gets regulated back into philosophy because its not measurable in any scientific sense even though the answer is looking us in the face.
It doesn't exist.
I bet it also puts a hurting on your ability to tell the truth. Or tell anything.
Most westerners are under the misconception that truth equals immutable facts, but in truth its really what the person believes in. That is why torture doesn't work because the person maybe believe in something that has no factual basis and is willing to change their opinion on that.
You can create drugs to make people more talkative and trusting, but doesn't mean what they are saying is a fact. Simply that they believe it to be true.
If I thought I was being paid too little then I'd talk to my manager and/or find another job. If I thought I was working too long I'd talk to my manager and/or find another job.
No, its the law and if you don't like it then you can talk with your government representative or find another country to live in. ;)
What bothers me about this is that you take away risk to persons from war, and those persons are more willing to wage war...which leads to more war.
I disagree.
Humanity has never really thought about the consequences of war that much before they actually were fighting it.
And even then, it tends to lead to situations like were having in Georgia right now where people are arguing who shot first or who killed the most people and then everyone gets in a fight again.
In reality, unmanned fighting craft will be the wave of the future simply because its more economical to fight a war that way and it can deliver more death to the enemy without risking casualties on your own part. (That was the whole point of switching from fights, to spears, to swords, to guns, to artillery, to tanks, and then to bombers)
This leads to my second point, I always thought fondling of the Bolo books in which the question was brought up why humans even bothered to fight inside fully intelligent machines which could fight on their own just as well or even better.
Two reason were explained...
The first was to show to the machines that the humans were willing to die along side of machines. Something of a honor and respect thing so that the machines wouldn't turn on the humans.
The second was because it gave the machines hatred or a reason to kill. In one of the novels the machine actually tells the human "No. I will no longer kill for you." and talks the human pilot into negotiating with the aliens.
In that regard, machines can be used to create calculated war crimes, but they won't go crazy do to combat fatigue or predisposed hatred like you saw in the Balkan wars or the issues were seeing in Russia (Russians and Georgians are very fond of each other).
Machines would never take revenge own their own. They would never just bomb a village because they are too scared to go in themselves.
Yeah I know these machines aren't fully AI, but the same thing applies to a guy sitting in an air conditioned bunker pushing the buttons. He's not getting shot at and he's not usually going to start blowing up people without being ordered to.
That still leaves calculated war crimes by the upper brass, but those things have always happened without unmanned machines as it is.
Um ... I'm sorry, are you agreeing with me or disagreeing with me?
Yes.
They still have the power to refuse classification if it's featuring illegal or seriously freaky shit.
Two points:
1. By default they determine what is illegal and what is not.
2. One mans freaky shit is another mans Mona Lisa.
To expound on number 2, is the question of who determines what is what?
Obviously, if you time traveled back to the 1950's and showed a copy of modern television to the average Joe off the street he'd most label it pornography.
And to continue on this issue, what is freaky shit itself illegal and not the actual acts?
If a person goes out and murders someone while recording it and passes around a video tape on the net, the persons owning the video tape shouldn't be prosecuted but rather the guy who murdered in the first place.
You could argue the attention made them do it, but I'm sure anyone willing to murder in the first place would still do it even if he didn't have an audience.
Even if it were possible for us to just "leave them alone", it wouldn't be a solution. They'd only continue to stagnate.
Do tell how western Europe rose out of the dark ages and became the modern world that it did now?
Actually, it had something to do with constant war, plague, and famine for almost 500 years.
That and the ejection of a good deal of its populace to colonies from the 1500's to the early 1900's.
The core problem is population.
The simplest solution would be birth control. Hell, China understands this with their one child policy. Not many people like it but without birth control the alternatives are only war, disease, and famine.
Let us not be pussies about this, short of submitting a biometric signature every time I want to authenticate just how else can a machine tell I am me?
You could implant an RDIF chip to someone heart which only functions when the heart is beating so if someone removed that it not longer function.
A little extreme, but no one could ever call you a pussy.
This is going to get modded flame bait but this is probably one of the reasons why your games in particular are getting pirated and not so much bought: people are downloading the pirated version, trying it a couple times, but because the game play is boring and repetitive, they are deleting it.
I think he's just asking the wrong question. Instead of asking why pirates are pirating, he should be asking why aren't buyers buying?
If he focuses on reaching out to his playerbase and building a community then loyalty will pay for itself.
Chechnya was de facto sovereign by your standards, having signed a peace treaty with Yeltsin after the first Chechen War.
The Russians honored the peace agreement until Chechen's invaded Dagestan.
Yes, the response was over the top, but if the radicals kept well enough alone then then Russia might have not went back in.
I'll concede the whole Caucasus region has been politically messed up for the past 100 years so one could basically create arguments blaming the Geopolitiks of WWI (Germany, Ottaman Empire, Russian Civil War, Stalin/Lenin) causing the situation we have today down there.
No one will ever win the argument of who shot first. You'll have to work on who is going to shoot last.
I think a more sensible legislation would be legalizing poking obnoxious cellphone loudmouths in the eye with pencils..
Personally, I have found that its more annoying when other passengers try to strike up a conversation with me.
Once I was flying during the summer by myself for business and I ended up sitting next to this really intoxicated lady in her late 50's. On retrospect it was kind of funny, but kept asking me personal questions and even offered me several thousand dollars if guessed her age right as well flaunting his rings and so on.
Being the gentleman that I was I politely declined and the paranoid in me felt that she was probaly trying to get me into a hotel room by herself and she wasn't exactly a looker. I tried to smile and answer with as short as possible the ever probing questions but she almost got into an altercation with the flight attendant over more drinks.
Luckily she passed out about 60 minutes or so into the flight and I fled my seat as soon as we landed.
If she had a cell phone, I'm sure it would have kept her occupied rather than having her attention directed towards me.
To be fair, its rare to be sitting next to an ever inquisitive passenger and most of the time the person sitting next to me is uninterested in me as I am of them.
It is VERY unlikely that electricity production costs in the US will increase that rapidy in the next few years since coal and nat gas are the primary fuels. Reserves for both are quite large.
If peak oil does happen, companies like Sasol will be hitting it big with Fischer-Tropsch coal to synthetic oil conversion which may actually increase the demand for coal.
As it stands, the recent trend in higher oil prices have also caused increases on coal as well as the decrease in coal price as oil declines in the past few weeks.
It might just be market speculation but oil and coal prices are tied together.
It's probably unanswerable, but I wonder how much energy it takes to make these cells, and how long it takes for them to offset that?
From my understanding, current systems (with tax rebate) pay for itself in 10 years at current prices from the end users standpoint.
However, if say conventional energy prices double again in the next 5 years, then solar panels will have payed for themselves in a much less of a time frame even without the rebate.
I think its a misnomer about how much any energy it takes to make something because the price of energy itself fluctuates with time. Lets say it might take 10 barrels of oil to create one solar panel that produces 1 barrel of energy a year saving which will pay itself off in 10 years but if oil costs $100 last year and $200 in the next 5, then your $1,000 system now is worth $2,000 and your system is creating the equivalent of $200 worth of energy saved a year therefore paying itself off in 5 years.
Hope that made sense. I'm sure the numbers are no where like that though.
Seeing that the price of sunlight is less volatile than the price oil or coal, one could really gamble that peak oil will make any investments into solar pay for itself in short order in the next decade.
What of a static non-expanding universe and alternate redshift paradigms?
A personal theory of mine is that redshift is affected by gravity and lack thereof.
Gravity's effect is more apparent the close you are to a body. The closer you are to the earth the more you are affected by earth's gravity and the closer you are to the moon the more you are moon's gravity and so on.
Hence, seeing light is affected by gravity, there might be something going off with the hand off between galaxies and other galaxies around it.
Now if only I can figure out how to get in on the luxury app market...
I can't find the source, but I remember hearing a story about NYC fashion design student whose senior thesis involved her buying expensive name brand clothing and then clothing from Target or Walmart and then swapping the tags that are sewn into the necklines.
She went to a consignment shop and asked more (of course) for the cheap clothes with luxury tags on the cheap clothing and less for the luxury items with the cheap tags on it.
As it turned out the clothes original from Wal Mart/Target sold quickly while the luxury items (even though priced cheaper) did not sell because of the tags.
Of course this could be an urban myth.
Health records may be private - you don't particularly want your neighbors to know about it. But the company that is insuring you certainly has a right to know what type of risk they're insuring - and just like auto insurance your cost should reflect it.
Umm... The difference between not having car insurance and not having health insurance, is one you can't drive when you don't have it and the other you can die.
Sure you can always visit the emergency room, but for some treatments it requires a bit more long term treatment.
My beef is that you should not be able to deny anyone anywhere needed medical treatment for something they have no control over including and not limited to family history and genetics.
The issue is that we'd be paying a lot less less anyways towards health care if insurance would be focused more on preventative measures than waiting til people have no choice but go into the emergency room.
And then you'll get sick of having arms that feel like wood. Mouse-elbow would be nothing compared to this thing.
Exercise never hurt anyone.
In fact... I think most of Slashdot could use a bit more.